Steven Gilligan

Master of all things Silver Age!

Steven died in May 2007, and we really miss him.

Born in Yorkshire, but quickly heading for the big city lights of Brighton, Steven first full length novel was Elsewhere, and he also produced the delectable short flash film, My Name is Alan, as a treat for the consumers of all things Silver Age. He took some time to consider the direction of his second novel, after perhaps something overenthusiastically embracing and then abandoning the idea for Alpha.one, but ultimately did not complete one..

During his long, long life (estimates of his age in 1999 ranged from 26 to an unlikely 302), Steven found many different ways to express his artistic intent, even from his earliest days as a child in West Yorkshire. For example, together with frequent co-conspirator John Greenwood, he was the publisher of an illicit school newsletter, slipped surreptitiously into the pupil registers for unwitting teachers to read out...

Upon attending secondary school, Steven wasted no time in enrolling as a school librarian. As every reader of HP Lovecraft knows, librarians have access to secret knowledge, hidden books and things that men were not meant to know! However, in this he was disappointed, as Oakbank School library surprisingly contained neither the damnable Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt nor (amazingly for such a well-stocked learning resource centre) the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn.

At 16, Steven made a short appearance in a Tanita Tikaram video, Little Sister Leaving Town, as a dancer in a turn-of-the-century village hall. The video was shown once on ITV’s The Chart Show, but has rarely been seen since. As a result, Steven’s many, many fans were waiting on tenterhooks for a video or dvd release of Tanita’s Greatest Hits – eventually YouTube came to the rescue! Steven is to be seen, if you watch carefully, during a shot of the dancefloor!

At the age of 17, he thought, for an instant, that there might be some money to be made out of gullible fools willing to believe in astrology, and, for a price, fooled them into accepting the product of a ZX Spectrum astrology program as the result of hours of hard work and occult skill. Later, on an impulse, he and the Silver Age maestro himself, Stephen William Theaker, decided to expand on this interesting beginning and set themselves up as ghost hunters, putting a card in the window of a magic shop half-way along a long narrow street in Haworth (former home of the Bronte sisters) – reputedly the most haunted street in England.

Unfortunately, the ghost hunting never took off, largely thanks to Theaker, despite his literary brashness, being unmitigatedly frightened of the dark.

Still 17, Steven also spent a period as prime mover with the rock group, Master Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife – the name of the band inspired the characters that would later appear in more than one Silver Age novel. They recorded one short tape, the infamous Empty Bag. It featured such classic songs as “Teakettle” and “Kevin is Very Dull”. They went on to play a single concert at Double Six, a pub for under-18s... The concert was a roaring success, with door takings being sufficient to pay the band’s entry into a nightclub to celebrate. The group was described in the Keighley News as “a cross between Frank Sidebottom and the Pixies”. The band was offered another gig, at the wedding of a young army recruit, but by then Steven had decided to follow other dreams, and the rest of the band were left to fend for themselves.

Steven also played with a less successful band, The Lost Teakettles of Atlantis, for which he recited beat poetry over backing music cobbled together from KLF b-sides.

Later in life, after a brief flirtation with art school and the power of Satan, Gilligan toyed with the idea of moving to Canada, only to realise that his future lay in the south. There, from his base in sunny Brighton, he initiated or played a key role in such projects as New Words magazine, Cartonia Orange 7, Serious Intent (ISBN 0 904733 94 7), an anthology of poetry from QueenSpark Market Books, and, of course, most importantly and recently, the wonder and magic that is Silver Age Books!

Once, while walking down the street in Brighton, he thought he heard Bobby Gillespie, of Primal Scream fame, call him an unpleasant name. One other time, he believed that Gary Clail, of the On-U Sound System, was chatting up his girlfriend.

The short stories produced during his first years in Brighton were written during long midnight shifts as night porter in various hotels, so if you ever passed through that city of the sun, only to be frighted by an ominous scribbling emanating from the darkness, you now know whence it came! While working at one of those hotels, he changed a shower curtain for The Commodores and shared a pint with Geoff Boycott. Even once those long hours in silent hotels became a thing of the past, the midnight eyes, the wary ears, ever listening for the sound of scurrying rats, remained, leaving Gilligan an artist ever ready to attend to the darker parts of the Silver Age...

Some of those seminal short stories are now available on this site: Frank and the Hermaphrodites and Something is Always Missing.

For a brief but brilliant period in 1992 he drummed and vocalised as one of The Theakers.

January 2001, and Steven’s many fans flocked to his spectacular and unusual website: www.geocities.com/stevengilligan, which featured poetry and a dancing Gilligan! (Also of interest to Gilliphiles will be the Homegrown Goodness site, on which, among much other hilarious work, there is a portrait of Steven Gilligan at a book signing attended only by giant spiders – see it here.)

During April 2002, insane scientists worked on predicting the likely appearance of Steven Gilligan in the year 2027, just in case he disappeared from public view, like Howard Hughes or Elvis. See the fruit of their researches here.

In May 2002 Steven moved to Birmingham to join the Silver Age Books permanent staff, and so, chained to his desk, he had no choice but to complete his first novel, Elsewhere, which can of course be ordered from www.amazon.co.uk. Slightly shorter than originally planned, the novel nevertheless took readers on a rollicking ride to the far edge of reality!

During 2005 a new phase began in Gilligan's writing life, with the simultaneous publication of The Ephemeral Homunculus, the story of a little man, and Excelsior, the story of a big robot. See the bibliography below for further details. He also had published in that year a short comic, collecting assorted hilarious strips, such as the Bored Fish and the Ill People, Gilligan's Thigh-Land #1.

In 2006 the publication began in TQF of Helen and Her Magic Cat, a brilliant comic strip.

I can’t quite remember when I first met Steven Gilligan. It might have been at the school library, where I soon joined him, John Greenwood and Sam Dixon as a student librarian. It might have been after someone suggested I look in on a writers’ group (made up mainly of the same people) that was meeting at lunchtimes. Or I might just have met him in the hall at lunchtime one day. However it happened, it was a lunchtime, and he made an immediate impact on me, and we quickly became involved in a dozen silly projects together – we performed sketches at the school shows, started a band (Master Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife), tried to start a marbles revival, sold trumped-up horoscopes, offered a ghost hunting service, created New Words, launched Silver Age Books, published our novels, and most recently we created November Spawned and Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, to both of which he made notable contributions.

In amongst all that, we laughed a lot, talked a lot about computer games, tv and music, and drank a bit from time to time. He introduced me to Hellblazer, HP Lovecraft, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Warhammer, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, Galaxie 500, Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, and a million other things I love just as much for which I’m forgetting to give him credit, and took me to my first ever gigs (The Wedding Present and The Wonder Stuff).

He gave me confidence in whatever I wanted to do, gave me a kick up the butt when I needed it, taught me how the importance of the punk rock spirit in everyday life, and did a brilliant job as the best man at my chaotic wedding.

Anyway, he’s gone now – he died at the end of May in 2007. For the rest of my life it’ll feel like something’s missing. My daughter’s lost someone who would have been the best “bad influence” uncle a kid could ask for (and he introduced her to Peppa Pig, Mini Moni and The Bear in the Big Blue House, as well as giving her about fifty brilliant toys and books), and I’ve lost a best friend. He was also the best gift-giver I've ever known – birthdays and Christmases are going to really suck now.

We have some of his Helen and Her Magic Cat strips in hand, so his presence will be felt directly in the magazine for a little while yet, and indirectly for as long as it lasts. If we can, we’ll also put together a new collection of his work at some point.

I think he would have appreciated the way I found out that he was a goner.

Sitting in the lobby of his tower block, waiting for news from the police who had gone to open and investigate his room, I heard someone, a cleaner I think, yelling, “Have you heard? Someone on the first floor has kicked the bucket!”

I couldn't help laughing, because that’s exactly how Steven would have wanted it. – SWT.

Novel

Elsewhere (2002) Read a sample! / Order from Amazon

Novellas

The Indigo Skies of Home: Sabaku (2005) TQF #5

The Ephemeral Homunculus (2005) NS #1 #2 #3 #4

Short Fiction

Cartonia Orange (1994) (co-author) Stories

Olroch and Raymond's Sea Journey on Wheels (1995) New Words #1

The King George Theatre (1995) New Words #2

Something Is Always Missing (1995) New Words #3

The Mouth of a Road (c.1999) Read on Steven's website